FOOD STUFF

FOOD STUFF; A Filmmaker's Look at a World of Waste Not, Want Not

By REGINA SCHRAMBLING

Published: March 21, 2001

Forget ''Chocolat.'' The most seductive food movie right now is Agnès Varda's documentary ''The Gleaners and I,'' playing at least through Tuesday at Film Forum in SoHo.

Ms. Varda, 72, intertwines thoughts on aging with a look at the contemporary French equivalents of the women in ''The Gleaners,'' the 1857 painting by Jean-François Millet at right. These are the people -- poor, frugal or just savvy -- who go into the fields to pick the grapes the mechanical harvesters missed or the figs left to rot or the potatoes rejected as too large (the French do prize the petite, after all).

Ms. Varda rambles with her digital video camera from gypsy encampments to Burgundy vineyards, where gleaning is forbidden to control vintages. She finds Dumpster divers and encounters a judge, far right, who stands in a field in his black robes to quote laws on gleaning.

Gleaners are also city dwellers, and Ms. Varda discovers a surprising character who subsists on the fruits and vegetables and parsley left behind as garbage in Paris markets but turns out to have a much nobler calling. She also finds Édouard Loubet, the chef at the two-star Moulin de Lourmarin, who charges $100 a person for a meal and just happens to have a little taste for gleaning himself. REGINA SCHRAMBLING